Suddenly, Duckies (a rant)

Monday, April 08, 2013

This picture captures this sudden burst of anger I had while trying to talk about dieting strategies this morning, and I was like "where the heck did that come from?" Just so you know it's coming and I kind of find it hilariously absurd...

Ideally, and what I believe SparkPeople promotes, is understanding your balance first and then adjust that to lose weight. You also see this spelled out in the Hacker's diet. But the vast majority of diets, because they are from books and can't be tailored for height and baseline weight, wind up being "eat less, move more" endeavors. Most of these diets have had very good ideas, but the second you get to part III of putting the theory into action with a menu, these diets have starved me because they were written for someone who was 5'4" and weighs 150 pounds. (I'm guessing this because that's borderline overweight for a woman of average height.)

As a consequence, I've never even gotten to the point of being a yo yo dieter because I could never stay on a plan for more than a couple weeks. The closest I've been to goal before was on Body for Life which was pitched to men as much as women, so the menus provided more than 1,000 calories a day. This lead to me thinking I was biologically unsuited for lose weight. I never would have guessed that tracking calories, which every other diet book I'd read promised they wouldn't make me do, was the very thing that would set me free. I've kept their other ideas of eating vegetables and protein and healthy fats. I just needed to have enough calories to stay on the plan long enough to see results.

The thing that makes me really angry is that these books knew how many calories were in their plans. They counted the calories for me and they tried to starve me. They knew that to give success to the average person, they were going to turn their backs on everyone who wasn't average, who might be taller or had more than 30 pounds to lose. It wasn't malicious, any more than food companies who carefully formulate their chips to get you to overconsume is malicious. It's just business.

POPSY190
It just doesn't pay these diet books' authors for their readers to be successful. Then there wouldn't be enough desperate people to try their next offering! Am I being cynical? Probably, but I suspect with reason.1775 days ago

SUGAR0814
I can NEVER do a diet! They don't work. Well, let me rephrase that. They don't work for ME. I use to be one of those folks that ran out and tried every new diet on the market just to be disappointed by the end of the week. 1776 days ago